CHRISTINE FLOWERS: Politics clouds Pa. AG Kathleen Kane's judgement

I’d say I’m jumping on the bandwagon by criticizing Kathleen Kane, but in this case, it’s a flotilla. No, make that an armada. Our attractive attorney general with the Marcia Brady hair is clinging by the thinnest threads of respectability to a job that she won by making claims that, apparently, couldn’t withstand the acid test of truth: Tom Corbett did not delay the investigation into Jerry Sandusky’s nauseating crimes for political reasons.

That can’t be said for Kane, who parlayed the anger against Corbett and Penn State and poor Joe Paterno into a cushy state job as the chief Keystone Cop. In fact, I’d say her actions in office have proven just how apt that description really is.

Let’s start with arrogance. Kane has proven that she really wants to be a judge with all that entails, including the ability to part those penumbral curtains, peer deeply into the bowels of the constitutional cupboard and … voila! ... discover a right to gay marriage, sitting snugly on the shelf next to the fundamental “right to choose” an abortion. Kane guaranteed that now, we cannot only steal from Peter to pay Paul, we can marry them, too. It’s heartwarming that our attorney aeneral feels so assured of her “conception” of due process that she doesn’t need to consult the Founding Fathers. All those generations of “I am woman, hear me roar” have come to fruition in this attractive Lackawanna County package, to the point that when I see her at press conferences I half expect her to break into a chorus of “Don’t Cry for Me, Pennsylvania.”

But arrogant people, and particularly arrogant women, don’t usually care what others think of them. Take Nancy Pelosi. The Baltimore native (how ironic that she was born in a town nicknamed “Charm City”) has been burning bridges and engendering anger for decades, so compared to her, Kathleen Kane is a rank neophyte. Maybe that’s why our A.G. is still out to shape her image in such a way that we in the peanut gallery think she’s actually competent, and it’s just the big, mean, old boys in their mythical network that have it in for her. Who can forget that spectacle of her flouncing into the boardroom at the Philadelphia Inquirer, escorted by the man who defended John Peter Zenger back in 1733 (oh, sorry, wrong Philadelphia lawyer.) There is nothing more upsetting to a woman than to see another woman play the girl card, as in, “stop being mean to me because I have a uterus,” while at the same time demanding to be treated as an adult. Kane lost the right to be taken seriously when she let, um, an old boy from that mythical network do the talking for her.

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The reason Kathy went crying, by proxy, to the Inquirer was the fact that the newspaper had broken the story about her dustup with Frank Fina, Seth Williams and anyone else who had the courage to point out that she’d deep-sixed an investigation into unethical Philadelphia politicians who, suspiciously, all seemed to share the same voter registration she did. Kane’s feeble attempts at explaining that the investigations were racially biased and therefore flawed outraged both Williams and another principle investigator on the case, both of whom are African-American men. It is possible there are not a lot of people of color in Kane’s hometown of Scranton and she might be a little fuzzy on racial dynamics (even though she did graduate from Temple,) but it stretches both credulity and good taste to say that black investigators are going after black targets because they are bigoted.

And then we have this week’s revelations about Gov. Corbett’s alleged dilly-dallying, his deliberate campaign to stonewall the Sandusky investigation during an election year, his willingness to sacrifice abused young men so that he could become the powerful King of Keystone.

What’s that? The independent investigator that Kathleen Kane initially said she wasn’t going to appoint but ended up appointing anyway came to the conclusion that Corbett had acted properly and hadn’t, in fact, played the waiting game? Never mind.

Except we should all, in fact, mind. Kane has been doing this sort of thing all along, making accusations and promises and pointing fingers (which she then puts in her ears at the faintest sound of criticism) to hold onto a position that she might have been qualified for at a legal level but for which she is woefully unequipped at a strategic level. The chief prosecutor is not supposed to look weak, which is what Kane looks like. She is not supposed to start crying about the mean girls and boys on the political playground, the ones who are doing everything in their power to make her look bad (as if she needed any additional assistance.)

Is it 2016, yet?

Christine Flowers is an attorney and Delaware County resident who writes a column for our sister newspaper, The Delaware County Daily Times. Email her at cflowers1961@gmail.com